German is the official language, spoken by 98% of the population. There are several dialects of German spoken: Allemannisch (similar to Alsatian spoken in France); Bavarian in Bavaria; Frankish (similar to German spoken in Belgium and to Letzebuergesch); Low German; Mainfränkisch ; Low Saxon; Standard German and Swabian . Sorbian, also known as Wendish and Lusation, is a Slavic language spoken in Lusatia, which is a small area in the south-east of the former East Germany. There are some 70 000 speakers of two dialects: Upper Sorbian (around the city of Bautzen), resembling Czech; and Lower Sorbian , spoken around Cottbus, resembling Polish .

Bilingual German/Sorbian thoroughfare name sign in Cottbus

Frisian (21 000 speakers in the mutually unintelligible forms of North and East Frisian ) is spoken in an area around Saterland, postal codes 26640-26689 and around Emden and Oldenburg. In Nord Friesland (near to the Danish border) it is spoken on the peninsula of Sylt (postal code area 25960-25999) except in the far north around List, where Danish is spoken. It is spoken on the islands of Föhr (except around Wyk and Nieblum); Amrum and Helgoland (postal code areas 27450-27499). It is also spoken along the coastal postal code areas 25890-25959 and 25800-25889. There is a “mainland” dialect and an “island” dialect, and other dialects between villages within these main areas.

Until the mid 1990s, it was a legal requirement that a husband and wife share a family name. Before this date it was common for one or other partner to use a double-barrelled family name which incorporated the pre-marriage family names of both partners (e.g. Meier-Müller). Now both partners may keep their pre-marriage family names, and people married before the implementation of the law may also revert to their pre-marriage names, but a name consisting of the pre-marriage family names of both partners is no longer allowed. The new law “encourages the use of a common name”.

Surnames may exist of two hyphenated names, but not more than two (a 1993 law upheld by the constitutional court in 2009).

High court decisions in 2008 overturned laws stating that given names must be “by nature” given names (i.e. may not include family names, common nouns and so on); that they must be gender-specific (or, if the first given name is not gender-specific, a second, gender-specific, name must be given).

Given names may not have the potential to cause harm to the namee (e.g. Mickey Mouse, Kain, Osame bin Ladin).

In company addresses the name of the company precedes the name of the contact. The house number follows the street name. The form of address of the person or the type of company comes on the top line alone. In 2006, Deutsche Post changed the format to exclude a blank line above the postal code line. Thus:

Form of address
Contact name
Thoroughfare[ ]number
postal code[ ]SETTLEMENT

or

Company
Form of address[ ]Contact name
Thoroughfare[ ]number
postal code[ ]SETTLEMENT

For example:

or

Where the company name is a personal name, the word Firma may be used in the address thus:

The general rule is that the thoroughfare name and the thoroughfare type are written as one word, thus:

Hauptstraße
Bahnhofstraße

There are two important exceptions. If the thoroughfare name refers to the real name of a place (e.g. a town name, a castle name, a forest name, etc.) or to a surname ending in -er then there is a space between the thoroughfare name and the thoroughfare type, thus:

Mainzer Straße
Hamburger Allee
Durer Straße

The second exception is where complete personal names are used. In these cases, each component of the street name is separated with a hyphen. Note, however, that surnames only are not covered by this exception. Thus:

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße
Albert-Einstein-Straße

but

Beethovenstraße
Einsteinstraße

In street names beginning with prepositions or some adjectives (‘Am’, ‘An’, ‘Alter’, etc.) the preposition or adjective is followed by a space, thus:

Alter Marktstraße

The centre of the city of Mannheim, in postal code area 68, is built on a grid system where few of the streets are named. The building blocks have been given a letter and number between A1 and U6, and buildings are numbered within these blocks. An address in this part of Mannheim will therefore contain a line in the form:

A5,6

instead of a street name. The whole block may take this form:

Universität Mannheim
A5, 6
68159 MANNHEIM

A block address in Mannheim

Deliveries to Packstations , where customers can collect packages, have their own address format:

NB: German grammar rules governing articles, prepositions and adjectives are complex, and there is no need to explain them here. It is only necessary to be able to recognise them when and where they occur in addresses. For this reason a list without further explanation is provided. As a very general rule of thumb, the prepositions and adjectives listed may have one of the following endings added: nothing; -e; -er; -em; -en or -es.

The third digit indicates a city, a part of a city, or a municipality.

The last two digits are split into three categories, each indicating (a) post office boxes; (b) large users (receiving on average more than 2,000 letters per working day); and (c) groups of residences/businesses.

Post office box users now have two postal codes, one referring to their post box (for letters), the other refer­ring to their street address (for packages etc.). Large users may have a third postal code. Any database containing German addresses will need to be able to store three postal codes per company.

The international sorting codes W- and O- (indicating respectively West and East Germany) have been replaced by the single international sorting code D-.

The delivery office number (the number which followed the town name, e.g. 2000 Hamburg 46) is no longer used.

Sorbian, a Slavic language, will be encountered in the following postal code areas:

Where a town or district name stems from the name of two places which were originally separate, the name components are usually hyphenated:

Berlin-Chalottenburg
Willingen-Schwenningen

In virtually all other cases, no hyphenation is used:

Frankfurt am Main
Frankfurt an der Oder

Settlement names in Germany will often contain a suffix indicating geographical position such as am Rhein or bei Kamenz. The postal codes incorporate this information and the post prefers that such suffixes are not used in addresses except where two settlements of the same name have the same postal code.

In North Friesland, near the border with Denmark, settlements may have a German, Frisian and/or Danish name.

In the Sorbian-speaking area in the south-eastern part of the former East Germany, most towns and villages have both a German and a Sorbian name.